HMS Saracen

by Douglas Reeman

  Erskine threw down his pencil and stood up. As he leaned against the rough metal and idly watched the clear water below the scuttle he listened to the bugle as it sounded for morning Colours. Opposite the monitor’s buoy he could see three destroyers and an anti-aircraft cruiser moored together. As he watched he saw their ensigns slowly mounting the staffs, as the Saracen’s was doing at that moment above the quarterdeck.

  He looked past the other ships towards the unmoving pall of brown smoke which hovered across Valletta. Over there people had died in the twinkling of an eye. Women, children, it made no odds to death’s impartiality. But so long as the White Ensign was hoisted every morning there was still a chance, a glimmer of hope. He smiled in spite of his complete weariness. I sound like a bloody politician, he thought.

  He turned as a messenger tapped at the door. `Yes?’

  `Signal, sir.’ He handed over a sealed envelope with the flimsy sheet of paper. `And sailing orders, sir.’

  Erskine darted a quick look at the man’s wooden expression. On the lower deck sailing orders were a constant topic of conjecture. But today this rating had placed the signal in priority. It was unnatural. `What does the signal say, Bunts?’

  The man grimaced. `New captain is comin’ aboard in ten minutes, sir!’

  Erskine stared at him, his normal reserve momentarily forgotten. `What?’

  `In fact, sir, there’s a launch waitin’ at the jetty now.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a man who has seen a superior caught off guard.

  Erskine snatched his cap and jammed it on his head. One damned thing after another, he thought bitterly. McGowan was probably right. Troubles had a habit of breeding very rapidly.

  `My compliments to the O.O.D. Tell him I require his presence on the quarterdeck immediately!’ He took a last glance at the disordered office, his mouth curving with sudden resentment. `And pass the word for the Chief Bosun’s Mate.’

  The man hurried away, and Erskine followed him more slowly. Of course, it would have to be like this. Night liberty-men not yet returned, the ship a shambles from the night’s air raid and the Duty Watch only just recoveringi from a hurried breakfast.

  On the broad quarterdeck he felt the first promise of the day’s warmth, and unconsciously he ran his finger round the inside of his collar.

  Chief Petty Officer Craig, a massive, wintry-eyed pensioner, saluted and tucked his list of working-parties beneath his arm. `You want me, sir?’

  `Yes, Chief Bosun’s Mate. The new captain’ll be aboard in a few moments.’ He saw with faint satisfaction that the tanned face of the Chief Petty officer was unmoved by his terse announcement. `Fall in the side party and stand by the gangway.’ Erskine ran his eye quickly along the hoselittered deck. `And for God’s sake get this potmess cleared up !’

  Craig saluted and marched purposefully away, his mouth snapping open and shut like a trap as he called out a string of names.

  Gayler, one of the monitor’s two midshipmen, saluted and cleared his throat. `Boat shoving off from the jetty, sir!’ He was fresh from Dartmouth and very conscious of himself. `It looks like a fine day, sir.’

  You don’t know the half of it, thought Erskine. Aloud he snapped : `Man the side ! Stand by to receive the Captain!’

  The pinnace squeaked gently against the jetty’s rubber fenders, and as he looked down the flight of stone steps Chesnaye saw that his personal gear had already been stowed in the boat’s cockpit. A seaman stood at the bow and stern, and the coxswain waited loosely beside the brass

  wheel.

  As the boat pitched, a shaft of sunlight glanced off, Chesnaye’s metal trunk, and just for a brief instant he felt’, the old emotion touch his eyes. The years seemed to fall, away. It could have been Portsmouth harbour with Pickles,’, a boy like himself, waiting impatiently to take him to thel ship. So much had happened, yet so little. It was the same:

  ship. As if she had waited all these years. Unfamiliar in her dazzle paint, but unmistakable. She had lost her tall topmast, and her maindeck sprouted several Oerlikons and other automatic weapons instead of the old twelvepounders. Yet she was the same. The ship which had stayed with his thoughts over time itself. Once or twice he had seen her since those terrible days at Gallipoli. At Portsmouth he had once watched her waddling out to sea past the misty outline of the Isle of Wight, and again in Rosyth, paid-off and neglected. She had steamed her way back to the Mediterranean, and on to China. From Hong Kong to Spain to evacuate refugees from the Civil War, and then across the endless water to Ceylon as a training ship for cadets. Back into Reserve again, and then called once more to serve, like himself.

  Chesnaye shifted his weight to the other leg and cursed the pain in his thigh. Like his memory of the Saracen, the old wound had been his constant companion. He turned his head to look at the other warships moored nearby. Commanded by officers younger and junior to himself, they reminded him again that he had only held one command in his life. That had been a small sloop just after the Great War. A short, uneventful commission to break the endless monotony of shore appointments, junior posts in large ships and the final misery of his discharge from the Service.

  Many others had been `axed’ from the reduced Navy, but each case was individual. Some had been grateful, after being entered into the Navy by their parents at the age of twelve, to a service they had always hated. Others had been defiant, unwilling to accept the injustice, and had wasted precious time and money in a flare of effort to prove their worth in other fields. Chicken farms, the Civil Service, even the Church, had received and rejected them. Men like Chesnaye had been too dazed, too shocked, to act foolishly. They readapted themselves more slowly, licked their wounds and tried again.

  For nearly ten years he had wandered alone from one country to the next, working without complaint at whatever job took his eye. He had no ties. Both his parents were dead. His father during the final months of that first, faroff war, and his long-suffering mother in the influenza epi

  demic which followed it. Chesnaye first tried to return to the sea. He joined the Norwegian Antarctic whaling fleet, and for several years worked as a deck officer in the filth and noise of the factory-ship. His old wound reacted sharply, and he moved on to New Zealand, where with his carefully saved capital he bought a half-share in a farmappliance firm. Business improved, but as world affairs deteriorated, and the clouds gathered above Munich, Chesnaye quietly said his goodbyes to his astonished partner and started back for home.

  He was constantly dogged by the picture of his father as he had remembered him before the first war. He was determined that he would never lose his pride and suffer the final misery of complete rejection by the Service he had always loved. Chesnaye had never forgotten the Navy. He did not have to buy a bungalow in Southsea, to walk the promenade and watch the distant grey shapes slipping down-channel, and to stand moist-eyed at the sound of a barracks’ bugle. The Service was part of him. It never left him, no matter what he attempted. And to symbolise that trust and understanding the memory of the ugly monitor had acted as a prop. He knew, too, that unlike his father, he would accept the position of Officer of the Watch on Southend pier if necessary; but he had accepted the post of Training Commander in one of the new intake establishments with equal calmness. It was a start.

  But the waiting had been harder than he had anticipated. The first excitement of training and guiding the endless procession of civilian sailors-office boys, labourers, milkmen and others-wore off as he again felt the yearning and the want.

  He had almost laughed when he had seen the expression on the face of his captain when that gentleman had told him of his new appointment. The old man had been apologetic and then angry. `An old ship like that indeed ! By

  God, Richard, you’re more use to me here!’ He had waved his veined hand across the expanse of the establishment, glittering with painted white stones, flagmast and immaculate sentries. Months before, it had been a holiday camp, but through the old captain’s eyes it had shone like a battleship
.

  Now he was here. The waiting and the suspense torgotten. Like an unwanted burden the years seemed to slide from his shoulders.

  A voice interrupted his thoughts. `I say, any chance of a lift out to the Saracen ?’

  Chesnaye swung round, irritated at being caught dreaming as well as with the casual form of address. He saw a dishevelled officer, whose wide pale eyes were peering at him as if their owner were more used to hiding behind powerful spectacles. On his crumpled sleeve he wore two wavy stripes, between which ran a line of bright scarlet.

  Chesnaye nodded. `Yes, I am going in her direction.’

  The officer beamed, his youthful face creasing with pleasure. `Oh, jolly good!’ He held out his hand. `I’m Wickersley, the Saracen’s doctor, actually.’ He chuckled disarmingly. `I suppose I’ve got a cheek really. A tiny voice of caution warns me that you are rather senior!’

  Chesnaye felt his taut muscles relaxing. `Captain Chesnaye.’

  `Oh, splendid.’ Wickersley looked down at the waiting boat. `I’m not really genned up on the ranks yet. I’ve only been in the Andrew a month. I was at St. Matthew’s, y’know !’ He gestured towards the smoke-covered houses behind him. `Been over there all night keeping the jolly old hand in!’

  They went down the steps, and Chesnaye automatically stepped aside to allow the junior officer to enter the boat first, as was customary.

  But the Doctor shook his head cheerfully. `Oh no, sir! After you!’

  The coxswain dropped his salute and eyed the interloper balefully. He had expected the grave-eyed captain to blast the Doctor skywards as he bloody well deserved. Instead

  ah well-he shook his head sadly. It was a different Navy now. `Shove off, forrard !’ he yelled. The little boat swung into the stream and turned towards the mass of shipping.

  Spray danced across the pinnace’s canopy as it lifted gaily on the sparkling water. Chesnaye staggered and put out his hand to steady himself against the motion. On the long voyage from England he had noticed how unprepared he had become for all the mannerisms and tests of seaboard life. The restless sea, the daily routine, all seemed vaguely strange and unnerving. The convoy had slipped through Gibraltar Straits and had been attacked soon afterwards. Appalled, Chesnaye had watched ship after ship blasted to fragments by the enemy bombers which appeared to fill the sky. The destroyer escort in which he had been a passenger was commanded by an Australian who had done little to hide his irritation at Chesnaye’s constant presence on his bridge. Once he had snapped : `Jesus, Captain, you’ll get enough of this later-on! Why don’t you get your head down?’ But Chesnaye had found the Australian accent somehow reassuring, as it reminded him of the life in New Zealand. He wondered how that captain had fared in the night’s air raid.

  He instantly dismissed the convoy and everything else from his thoughts as he watched the sharpening shape of the monitor. Eagerly, hungrily, his eyes darted up and down her length, as if afraid to miss some scar or mark, as a mother will look at a grown-up son. She was older, but the same. There were streaks of rust around her hawse-pipe and more than one dent along her bulging hull, but nothing that he could not put right.

  The Doctor spoke from the cockpit. `I’d like to ask you aboard for a noggin, but it’s a bit early.’

  The boat drew nearer, and Chesnaye saw the familiar scurry and frantic preparations which culminated in a rigid knot of figures at the head of the long varnished gangway.

  His eyes misted, and over the years he heard Lieutenant Hogarth’s high-pitched voice screaming down threats to the flustered Pickles. And later when Pickles had warned him of the Captain. `He hates everybody, especially midship)nen !’

  Is that how they are thinking of me? he wondered.

  The boat lost way and idled towards the gangway, the I polished boathook poised and ready.

  Wickersley called, `Jolly decent of you to drop me here!’

  Chesnaye looked down at him, knowing that he was glad he had had company for those last few agonising yards. `Actually, I’m coming aboard myself!’

  The Doctor’s eyes widened. `Oh?’ Then, as the realisation flooded his mind, `Oh!’

  Chcsnaye straightened his back and stepped on to the gangway. He tried not to count the wide, well-worn steps, his mind blank to all else but the whirl of events which had at last overtaken him. His head lifted above the deck, and his brain only half registered the line of tanned faces, the raised hands, and then the shrill twitter of pipes which washed across him like floodwater. A few mumbled words, more salutes, a guard presenting arms and the flash of a sword.

  One face seemed to swim out of the mist. A calm, youthful voice said the words he had waited so long to hear. `Welcome aboard, sir !’He was back.

  2

  Out of the Sun

  Lieutenant Malcolm Norris, R.N.V.R., walked nervously to the front of the bridge and stared for several seconds intc the darkness. The four hours of the Middle Watch had all but dragged to their close, and now that it was almost time to be relieved the same old feeling of nervous anticipation was making his heart thump against his ribs.

  It was still very dark, with the stars high and bright against a cloudless sky and reflected in the black oily water which slopped and gurgled against the ship’s labouring hull as the monitor plodded slowly towards the invisible horizon.’!! A steady south-west breeze made the ship rock uncomfortl ably, so that every piece of metal in the bridge structure groaned in regular protest, yet its clammy breath brough~ no life to the men on watch, but made them move con,, tinuously as they peered into the darkness.

  Norris cleared his throat and jumped at the noise the sound brought to the silence around him. He still could not believe that he was Officer of the Watch, for four hours in sole charge of the ship and the safety of every man aboard. For the four months he had been aboard he had been assistant ‘to Lieutenant Fox, the Navigating Officer, and had4 shared the Middle Watch without complaint. Fox was a hard-bitten professional seaman from the Merchant Navy, who until the outbreak of war had been First Mate of a1 banana boat. He was an uncouth, outspoken man who fre quently gave vent to criticism of his straight-laced companions and all the Royal Navy stood for. As the months passed and the ship took on more amateur officers like Norris, Fox’s criticism and complaints gave way to contempt and finally long periods of silence, broken only occasionally by a string of fierce swearing and rage when an error of seamanship or navigation offended his watchful attention. If nothing else, Norris conceded, Fox was a first-rate seaman, and when you shared a watch with him you had nothing to worry about. Norris had been content to dream and dwell in the brave world of his imagination, and carry out the minor jobs of the night’s most hated watch.

  He realised now only too well that he should have made more use of his time. Overnight everything had altered. The watches had been changed around because Erskine, the senior watchkeeper, had been taken off the rota in order to assist the new captain during his takeover period. In a flash Norris found himself in charge of the watch, and, even worse, had been given Harbridge, the Gunner (T), as his assistant. Harbridge was a squat, vindictive little warrant officer of the old school. He had worked his way slowly and steadily from the spartan misery of an orphans’ home to the undreamed power of his one thin stripe of gold lace. The journey had covered many years, through a boys’ training ship, destroyers, cruisers, naval barracks and practically every other type of ship or establishment which flew the White Ensign. He had become used and hardened to harsh discipline, and had never expected anything else. Accordingly, he treated his subordinates with the same lack of feeling and understanding, and had never altered his own rigid standards of efficiency.

  Norris knew all this about his companion, and had felt the man’s bitter resentment the moment he had joined the wardroom. Norris had been a teacher in a London secondary school. Apart from a few evenings a week at lectures given by a fierce-eyed instructor at the local drill-ship, he knew little of the Navy. All he knew was that he loved and admired everythin
g about it. The war had been the one final opening previously denied him. After an uneventful few months aboard an old cruiser which spent most of its time anchored in the Firth of Forth, Norris had been sent to a gunnery course at Whale Island. The shouting, noise and robot-like drill had appealed to him instantly, and although he had finished the course not far from the bottom of the list, the impression of the gunnery school had been marked on his mind like a battle honour. He had gone on leave and revisited the old school. How small and untidy it had seemed after Whale Island. The sticky paper across the windows as a safeguard against bomb-blast, the, brown glazed tiles and the rain-dappled playground. Most of t, children had been evacuated for the duration, but to t1i remainder, and the members of the dingy staff-room, Non had tried to pass on the new-found glory and happinc which he had found in his new life.

  When he had been appointed to the monitor Norris hi outwardly expressed indignation and dismay. Inward! however, he was satisfied. The ship seemed big and sai There always seemed to be another officer or a competes petty officer close by when a small crisis arose. In a de troyer it might have been different, but as it was Nor: found himself in his present position with hardly an id of how he got there.

  Joyce, his wife, had been scornful whenever he had dare, to mention his inner doubts to her. `Don’t you let them pu you around, Malc !’ He hated the way she abbreviatsj his name, just as he did her sharp South London accer `You’re as good as they are, and don’t you forget it P

  In his mind’s eye Norris saw himself sitting in the war room as he had so often in the last four months. Outward attentive and bright-eyed, he had carefully watched aj, listened to the men who shared his steel world, and ha tried to pick the ones he should follow, even copy, a those he should avoid.

  John Erskine was his secret hero. Calm, handsome ai so very sure of himself. The senior member of the mess, Dartmouth officer, all the things which Joyce would ha warned him about, yet the very accomplishments whi would have made her purr should they have come in b direction. Norris liked the way the ratings respect Erskine yet never took advantage of his casual manner. I saw himself like that. Well, one day.